I was looking through the Wiki and saw something called the Penlite. I was curious if Apple ever made a working prototype that was released. Would've loved to see a PowerPC tablet, to bad the Newton ruined it.
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Was the Penlite ever released?
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Neat, thats an impressive product. As noted, you could dock it into a Duo dock, now that's cool. So basically, what we have here, is a iPad/Laptop/Desktop/VHS Tape twisted breed of machine. Impressive. Too bad it was never released.
I had never heard that it shipped in any quantity at all. That it was in very late stages of development, near-production quality, but not that it was ever actually released to the public.
No.
Hard stop.
The Penlite was based on the earlier PowerBook Duos, which use the Motorola 68030 CPU. There was one PowerPC Duo, the 2300c, but it was released noticably later. (After the Penlite project was discontinued.)
The linked video has it running Macintosh System 7.1.2 - which was available on the very earliest PowerPC systems, but again, was not able to run on any of the PowerPC portables (the first PowerPC portables, the PowerBook 5300c and PowerBook Duo 2300c came out with the PowerPC 603e CPU, which wasn't supported until System 7.5. Only the earliest desktop PowerPC 601 based systems could run System 7.1.2.)
Lastly, the PowerBook Duo 2300c was based on the older NuBus architecture, not the newer PCI architecture, and the NuBus Macs cannot run OS X, with any amount of hacking. Even the earliest PCI architecture Macs require all sorts of upgrades or software hacking to run even the earliest versions of OS X. And the 2300c was also very limited in that it could only take 56 MB of RAM - where 64 MB was the absolute minimum to get OS X to boot in any form (and 128 MB the official minimum spec, and the minimum reasonable amount to get OS X to be usable at all.)